(Concluded from yesterday, Part 1.)
The meme war could only be going on outside if it was going on inside.
And I feel it operating inside.
In my speaking, I still exaggerate and slip into drama.
When I get irritated, I go out of relationship by getting angry. I don’t stop soon enough. I’m fertile for meme-warfare recruitment.
I allow myself to believe that complex things can be summarized in a single sentence. I pretend to have knowledge of something when I really don’t. These are vital tools for fighting a meme war.
All of this is reductionism (1) and polarization and makes me an easy target if I wasn’t supported by a network of folks, seen and unseen, who remind me what direction is forward.
In my worst moments, I think to myself, it’s going to take so long to recover, to get back to a creative and productive civil discourse, that it all seems hopeless.
In even trying to persuade other professionals to calm down and return to neutral reporting, I feel like a pacifist in boot camp.
Meme wars are born of the need to be right, successful, and winning and attribute our mistakes, losses, and defeats to others. That is distinctly Third Dimensional and ego-born and wouldn’t survive a microsecond in the inner tsunami of love.
But sooner or later, we’ll be returning to neutral reporting … no, we’ll have a New Journalism to go along with the Ocean of Love we’ll be sailing upon.
At that time, when we look back, what will we see as the way we participated?
Footnotes
(1) Reductionism is “the practice of simplifying a complex idea, issue, condition, or the like, especially to the point of minimizing, obscuring, or distorting it.” (WWW Dictionary at https://www.dictionary.com/browse/reductionism.)